By Mark Gullick for the Occidental Observer
In December of last year, Gaza’s oldest mosque was largely destroyed by Israeli air-strikes. The Omari mosque dating back to the seventh century and named for Umar ibn al-Khattab, Islam’s second caliph, and so is much mourned. It is worth noting in passing that Islam does not separate religion and state as the West does, and so such a strike is against a target as much political as religious.
One act in the tragedy of war is the destruction of venerated architecture. Göring’s Luftwaffe tried desperately to bomb St. Paul’s Cathedral in London during World War II, the bombs falling all around the famous dome but never finding the target. The destruction of St. Paul’s would have adversely affected British morale, but both miraculously survived.
Now, another ancient and respected British institution is under attack; Parliament. Three events in England in the last month may have seemed singular viewed individually, but taken together they could permanently shift the tectonic plates of British government. First, intimidation by pro-Palestinian mobs, along with death threats made to Members of Parliament (MPs), may have altered the outcome of a Parliamentary vote on a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. A few days later, a local by-election was won by a veteran Islamist White politician who dedicated his win with the opening line of his victory speech; “This is for Gaza!”. Finally, the next week, a leading figure in the Conservative Party said in an unguarded interview moment that he believed that the London Mayor, Muslim Sadiq Khan, was under the control of Islamists in the nation’s capital. Within days, there was one word predominantly on the media’s lips; Islamophobia.
The term “Islamophobia”, which came into being around a century ago and has been, to use a modern term, weaponized by the Islamic lobby, is as potent as the word “racism”, and ultimately just as devoid of meaning. Words, however, do not have to have meaning nowadays, and some are increasingly purely performative, used not as descriptive but as accusatory. Muslims and their cheerleaders use the term to damn perceived opponents and critics, while those who challenge it point out that a “phobia” is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing Islam. As noted, meaning is not a priority in modern political linguistic usage.
The chain of political events that led to the word once again being prominent began at Westminster, when the Speaker of the UK’s House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, broke with Parliamentary precedent during a vote over a ceasefire in Gaza. As with any such proceedings, the details are intricate, but essentially the vote was allowed to take place in such an amended way that it would assist the opposition Labour Party and its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, to head off a major rebellion by their front-bench MPs. Equally important were the reasons Hoyle gave for his controversial decision, or rather one of them. He was, said the Speaker, concerned for the safety of MPs leaving the building after the vote. What could have been the threat outside the Mother of all Parliaments? Knife crime? Global warming?
The reason was a mob of pro-Palestinian supporters massed outside the House, who seemed to be looking to re-create the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when men of Kent and Essex burnt many of London’s landmarks to the ground.
What happened that evening cannot be under-stated. If the outcome of a British Parliamentary vote can be swayed by the activism of a mob, then all bets are off. The pro-Palestine mobs that have infested London streets every Saturday since October 7 last year have been increasingly brazen as they realize they are not really being policed, and if thus emboldened they are unlikely to slacken, and will go from vocal to violent. In addition, the Gaza vote was extraordinary in that it will have registered little interest in Gaza itself, while it has become the focal point for a seismic shift in British politics taking place over 2,000 miles from Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Just over a week after Sir Lindsay kicked a hornets’ nest with his irregular constitutional decision, attention shifted to a local by-election in a regional seat made empty by the death of the incumbent Labour MP, and which has a good claim to be the dirtiest such ballot ever fought in Britain. Again, the relevance of the outcome to UK politics cannot be over-emphasized.
Rochdale is a northern English town famed during the industrial revolution for its cotton production. More recently, its fortunes have fallen, and it was one of the towns exposed as being home to largely Muslim “grooming gangs” who drugged and raped young White girls with impunity for many years. They were unhampered by the police and only briefly reported by the mainstream media, very late and even then, minimally and reluctantly. Peter McLoughlin’s book Easy Meat charts this industrial-scale rape, often of minors, perpetrated almost exclusively by men of Pakistani origin. He is clear on the political gain of a cover-up: “Thousands and thousands of schoolgirls were sacrificed so that the elite in Britain could make obeisance to their religion of multiculturalism”.
The rape epidemic — which is still going on — was blamed on culture rather than religion, the apologists seemingly failing to notice that, in the case of Islam, the two are inextricably linked.
The Rochdale by-election was dirty and chaotic. Two weeks before the ballot, Labour withdrew support for its candidate, Azhar Ali, over alleged anti-Semitic comments made on social media. For the opposition party not to field a candidate at a by-election in the UK is vanishingly rare. The ruling Conservative Party expected to be trounced anyway in a dress-rehearsal for their likely wipe-out in the General Election later this year, and the up-and coming Reform UK fielded a candidate who had only recently been accepted back into political life after a scandal involving texts sent to a teenage girl. Even an unknown independent candidate, campaigning on issues concerning Rochdale (as you would normally expect from any candidate), finished second above what are usually recognized as the three main parties in Britain. But the clear winner, with more votes than those three parties combined, was veteran maverick George Galloway.
Galloway is a chancer and a rogue, seeking election wherever he believes he can be backed by a Muslim voting bloc, and has now represented four different constituencies in Parliament, a record equaled only by Sir Winston Churchill. The fiery Scot converted to Islam over two decades ago, and has had four wives, each one a Muslima. He is staunchly pro-Islamic and thus pro-Palestinian, which was the centerpiece of his campaign.
Galloway is a superb rhetorician in the Aristotelean sense. “Rhetoric” has now come to mean words alone, but there is far more to it than that, Aristotle defining it as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion”. Rhetoric is a lot more than words, a fact Galloway knows very well indeed. He is a hero to many British Muslims, and infamously met with Saddam Hussein, telling the Butcher of Baghdad that he saluted his “indefatigability”. Galloway regularly laces his speeches with heavily accented Arabic words and phrases.
Galloway is also a consummate campaigner. His team delivered two versions of the party’s campaign leaflets with basically the same text, but featuring a slight amendment depending on the recipient. Muslim households received a leaflet saying that Galloway would fight specifically for Muslims, while kuffar residences received a missive stating that he would fight for the people of Rochdale. Again, the situation in Gaza is shaping and molding politics in the UK, even at grassroots level.
At a hustings in Rochdale (“hustings” are British campaign-trail events, like stump speeches in the US), every question from journalists concerned the conflict in Gaza. At another, Galloway asked Muslim voters what they would say to their maker on Judgment Day when he asked them what they did for Gaza. This is a powerful image for some Muslims, and shows Galloway’s astute understanding of the Islamic faith. At a press conference, he said intriguingly that “the next election will be all about Muslims”. The next election in Britain is the General Election.
Lee Anderson is one of those British politicians known as “enforcers”. This is unofficial, and nothing like the enforcement of the Chief Whip, who ensures voting solidarity among his party’s MPs. But Anderson is a bullish man who does not suffer fools gladly. He was, until recently, the Chairman of the Tory Party and, until even more recently, still in the party. Not anymore. His comments on Sadiq Khan started a media squabble which soon become political, and led to Anderson’s suspension from the Conservative Party on charges of racism and Islamophobia. There is no point in pointing out yet again that Islam is not a race, and so Anderson’s comment could not be racist but, as noted, words don’t mean what they used to mean.
Anderson stated during a TV interview that Khan was controlled by Islamists. This started a furious media squabble about language, an increasingly strong focal point this century with respect to political, or politicized, words and their usage. Every TV hack is suddenly a linguistics expert after a row over the latest contentious Tweet or post, and it often seems as though the media are hosting a semantics seminar rather than confining themselves to mere reportage. Free speech was arguably freer during the reign of Queen Elizabeth —the First, that is — than that of the ailing son of Queen Elizabeth the Second, and politicians in particular are under forensic scrutiny. It is hardly surprising that MPs do not flock enthusiastically to the cause of free speech when their own is the most policed in the country.
Anderson was accused by Khan of both Islamophobia and racism, a double tap for a man often suspected of being a Muslim fifth-columnist and likely to be re-elected to the London Mayorship later this year. Khan has been a great proponent of immigrants coming to London, and this is the clearest example of the deliberate importation of a ready-made voting bloc, as Khan knows perfectly well that the vast majority of immigrants are Muslims, sectarian differences notwithstanding.
For immigration to the UK is not simply a steady procession of arrivals on dinghies on the Kent coast who have to be housed and fed and provided with debit cards and telephones. It is also a part of the political system, and the arrival of ever more Muslims will be as pleasing to Muslim leaders as it is to business owners. Immigrants were (in)famously described as part of an “invasion” by then Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman, connoting an invading army. That may be hyperbole, but the invaders of which she spoke could also be reservists in an army which is still at the stage of assembly.
A strong element in Britain’s self-deception about Islam since 9/11 is the tired homily telling us that “not all Muslims are terrorists” and “Islamists are just a handful of extremists and don’t represent Islam”. The first statement is literally true but not all Muslims need to be terrorists, and there will be plenty of smiling Muslim families — perhaps running your local shop, if you’re British — who will be quite happy that ISIS are doing the heavy lifting. There will be many DVDs of the Twin Towers in the collections of some Muslim households, right next to the video of Mohammed and Shamima’s wedding. Anything for the ummah, everything for Islam. And perhaps Islam is seeking to unite the British chapter of that ummah, and is eyeing a key caliphate in the new reconquista. This begins with alliance, forced or otherwise.
France is having the same problem as Britain with Muslim influence, and Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist who has been on the wrong side of Islam in the past, has one of his characters in the novel Submission suggest what could be about to happen in the UK (Houellebecq also predicted the current European farmers’ revolt in his novel Serotonin): “It’s true that Christianity and Islam have been at war for a very long time … but I think the time has come for accommodation, for an alliance”.
Islam is used to such alliances, provided the jizya is forthcoming — i.e., the tax occupying Muslims historically levy on their new subjects. The British wouldn’t even notice a new tax, currently being rinsed by the Internal Revenue at the highest rate since the end of World War II. As for Islamic shariah law, a lot of Brits would make a day of it if young offenders who have previously terrorized their neighborhoods were flogged in the town square, or more likely the car-park in today’s Britain. It would not surprise me if Galloway intends to turn Rochdale into a testing-ground for shariah courts, which already exist de facto in Britain.
The day after Galloway’s election, the British Prime Minister — fabulously rich Hindu Rishi Suna — made a speech outside Number 10 Downing Street in which he rehearsed themes that are becoming familiar to watchers of political semiotics. He conflated Islamism with the “far-Right”, an entity which does not exist in any meaningful sense, as I wrote about here at The Occidental Observer. Sunak called Galloway’s election “beyond horrifying”, and he had a strange take on Anderson’s comments, saying that “the words were wrong”. There is something incantatory about this, as though Anderson were a sorcerer’s apprentice who had uttered the wrong summoning spell. Henry Bolton, the leader of Nigel Farage’s old outfit, the UK Independence Party, described Sunak’s speech as follows: “His words were good, but it wasn’t going anywhere”.
This extraordinary statement shows, as noted, that there is a deep crisis in contemporary English-language usage and it needs bringing to light. We used to have philosophers to do that sort of thing for us.
But it is not all political machination. Islam, metaphysically equipped to play the long game but not averse to hurrying things along a little, knows that violence, or at least rumors of violence, are powerful rhetorical tools too. Richard Tice is the leader of the Reform Party, who are being spoken of as the heirs to conservatism should the Tories expected General Election defeat be even worse than expected. Tice has yet to prove that he differs from the political class, but he has not shied away from severe criticism of the campaigning by representatives of both Islamist parties in Rochdale. He claims severe staff intimidation and threats, polling station harassment, and a sudden spike in postal voting. Simon Danczuk, Reform’s candidate at the Rochdale by-election, is more specific in his allegations here.
Islam has been establishing beachheads in the British political process for years, and they have received an accelerant. As in the European lowlands of Belgium and Holland, local Muslim political power grows in the UK, and towns and cities gradually become micro-caliphates which may one day join hands. The Omari mosque was destroyed by military means. The destruction of British democracy may take time, but not a shot need be fired (although the possibility cannot be discounted).
The dissident Right are often conflicted over the question of Islam. Muslims, it goes without saying, are animated by a hatred of Jewry, and so get a pass from many on the far Right. My enemy’s enemy and all that. But the leading two British parties are heading into a General Election which has just come astonishingly to life, as if envious of the gunfight at the OK Corral which the American Presidential Election looks likely to be. If the UK’s election follows the same lines, Islam is drawing its revolvers first. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his opposite number, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, are trying desperately to placate two bitterly opposed factions over Gaza. Muslim leaders and imams in Britain know this, perceive weakness in the leadership, and know how to mobilize in synchronicity. Islam is increasingly setting the political agenda because Islam is the political agenda.
Finally, the question every politician asks secretly in that little part of themselves where they think what they really mean. Is it good for the Jews? Anti-Semitic violence is increasing in Britain (although every identitarian group claims the same thing), and the first Jew to die at pro-Palestinian hands in the UK — should that happen — may strike a match to a situation every bit as potentially explosive as the stash of dynamite with which Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up Parliament in 1605. For decades, Jewish influence on British politics had been monopolistic and required no enforcement. With sufficient influence in business and the media, British Jewry felt no need to bring in the Stern Gang. This surety no longer exists, and British-Jewish interests are about to discover that there are different types of power and different ways to exert political influence than just money.